The critical act, like other personal engagements, requires favourable conditions. But the opening night of this show by the Wedding Collective, staged in the vast upper gallery of the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane, was almost rendered inaudible by torrential rain beating on the glass roof. While you can't criticise a group for the weather, I feel this is one "found" space that should be quickly lost.
Three years ago, this company made a big impact with Warcrime, which dealt with the effects of an American cluster-bomb on a Serbian town. Now the writer-director Stephen Tiller has visited Ramallah, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Hebron. But, although his play is based on interviews, it lacks the veracity of Via Dolorosa and The Arab-Israeli Cookbook. Instead, Tiller has come up with a contrived moral thriller in which a 16-year-old Palestinian suicide-bomber, whose father has fallen into the hands of the Israeli police, is offered her father's freedom in exchange for sex with his captor.
The echo of Measure for Measure is deliberate. But, where Shakespeare places Isabella's moral dilemma in a vividly imagined social context, Tiller focuses almost exclusively on his drama's protagonists. And, even here, the play is riddled with problems. If the heroine is ready to embrace suicide, would an act of physical surrender, however repulsive, be beyond possibility? And when she does apparently agree to the police chief's demands, why does he walk into an obvious trap?
Given the circumstances, the actors do a brave job. Sean O'Callaghan effectively humanises the Scarpia-like police chief, Ranjit Krishnamma is all tortured desperation as the captive father and Shabana Akhtar Bakhsh conveys the daughter's iron determination. But a play that works in a chamber space seems lost in this rain-battered loft.
· Until June 11. Box office: 020-7251 8213.
